Where the Heck Do I Start?
No business can exist without paying customers, which means no business can exist without sales. It's relatively easy to look at any company, especially one doing well, and be able to describe who their customers are. However, when you are first building your business all you have is a theory of who you think your customer will be, based on your theory of the problem you are solving and your opinion of what you want to sell them. While it's important for you to have a strong point of view to get started, it's even more important to figure out if you are right before you get too far along. The repercussions of being wrong can be very expensive and can even cause your business to fail.
We've all heard stories about companies pivoting their product or customer focus. I've personally witnessed it dozens of times while working at startups and now with Techstars Austin. Pivots, small and large, are often crucial to figuring out how to build a big business; however, without a framework to figure out who your customer is, what they are buying, and why they buy it, ensuring your success is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
In this chapter we'll discuss the W3 Framework (Figure 1.1). This is what I used at Business.com, mySpoonful, and BlackLocus. It's also the framework I encourage my portfolio companies at Techstars to use. I've broken this chapter into five parts to make it a little more digestible.
This section is a description of W3, the framework I recommend identifying your ideal customer profile (ICP) and why it's important to start this work early on. In the second, third, and fourth sections, we'll dig into each of the three Ws.
“Who” Are You Selling To? explores identifying the who—who you believe your customer is and how you go about validating it.
In “What” Is Your Customer Buying? we will dig into the what, meaning what product or service you are selling (compared to what the customer is actually buying). Likewise, we will explore how you can validate that you are selling the right product to the right buyer.
And finally, in “Why” Is Your Customer Buying It? we will discuss the why of your business—why your customer is buying your product and how your customer will measure the impact on their business.
In the fifth section “Putting W3 Together,” I'll present you with an in-depth exercise to help you thoroughly outline your sales plan.
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Startup founders, especially in early-stage companies, often develop their sales plan based on their personal (and hopefully deep) understanding of the problem they are trying to solve and the product they are bringing to market. However, in my experience, most founders are not great at articulating exactly what they're doing or why. Founders may have a strong idea regarding who their customers will be and what their product or service will be. But in most cases, very little is done to validate their theory and even less is done to capture it in a way that is easy for anyone to comprehend. In the early days of starting your company when you are the one selling to customers, this is fine. However, this immediately becomes a problem when you start trying to hire, forecast, and raise money. The problem with not having an articulated sales plan is that you leave employees, candidates, investors, and even potential customers guessing at who buys what and why, and this, in turn, results in a lack of alignment, clarity, and confidence in the future of your business.
I've now been running sales organizations for over 20 years. Early on, I too failed to understand the importance of a clearly articulated sales plan. In fact, the concept of taking the time to articulate and write down a formal plan seemed like a giant waste of time. Worse, if what we were doing and why we were doing it wasn't obvious to someone, I questioned their intelligence or commitment to the company.
I was wrong.
At that point in my career, I hadn't been around enough experienced leaders building real (and big) companies to understand the importance of planning and process. I also didn't have (or even understand why I should have) mentors to help me grow. This was all on me to figure out. The good news was, my parents were both excellent role models for my strong work ethic. They had a keen and insightful worldview and taught me early on how to think about the present, but also about how events of today will affect the future. I've always had good intuition when it comes to business and over the years I've learned to trust my gut (and I could write an entirely different book on that). What I lacked was anyone ever showing me how to connect the dots from what was in my head and translating that into a plan to build something amazing.
Connecting the Dots from Thoughts to a Plan
In 2005 I was recently promoted to run sales and client services for Business.com. I finally realized just how important it was to articulate what “our” plan was—and why it was that way.
Business.com was an earlier-stage company poised for huge growth but had not arrived there yet. We had around 70 employees, in the mid-seven digits of revenue, and were selling a business-to-business (B2B) search product in the early days of Google Adwords. My predecessor did an incredible job getting us to that point and when his role evolved to focus more on corporate and business development, I was asked to step in for the next iteration of scaling our sales organization.
By this point we had a very experienced leadership team made up of ex-Yahoo, eBay, and Careerbuilder execs and a seasoned board made up of partners, founders, and CEOs from Benchmark, IVP, Earthlink, Boingo, shopping.com, PayPal, and LowerMyBills. While I had great intuition on developing a plan and some raw talent at sales, I had very little classical business training (i.e. no MBA and to this point no great mentor to teach me). It wasn't until I was asked to present my vision to the board that I truly realized the importance of defining and articulating a sales plan.
Fortunately my CEO, Jake Winebaum, was (and still is) an incredible strategist and likewise very good at cultivating raw talent. He wouldn't let me present anything less than a world-class plan and pushed me very hard to develop and articulate mine—this is where I truly learned the importance of taking what was in my head (and gut) and putting it on paper for everyone in the organization to see.
The best way for me to describe to you the weeks of intense mental work I put into developing this plan is to tell you about Jake's ability to ask one simple question: Why? Jake asked me “Why do you believe this to be true?” at every stage and about every aspect of the plan as it evolved. Multiple times a week I'd be in his office sharing the next iteration of the plan, and week after week I'd leave asking myself the same questions he was asking me. At times this was frustrating and borderline infuriating because I really never had anyone question or push me to that level of detail and specificity in the past, but ultimately it was one of the most valuable experiences I've had as a professional (and one I've carried forward with my work at Techstars).
What it forced me to do was dig inside my instincts and look for opinions, facts, and data to support what my gut was telling me. Sometimes that would help me support my opinion and other times it helped me to see potential flaws and areas of risk. Ultimately, it gave me (and him) the confidence to present the plan to the board and eventually the entire company because we knew we had something that we can easily articulate to anyone, the data to support the direction, and an understanding of the areas of risk.
I called my plan W3, which stood for who, what, and why....
